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Crossbreeding of Australian Superfine Merinos (ASMs) with Gansu Alpine Finewool (GAF) sheep and an evaluation of the potential benefits of this genetic cross has not been previously conducted. 13 ASMs were crossbred with GAF sheep over a five year period with backcrossing designed to assess heterosis. Data from 11,178 lambs sired by 189 rams were used in the study. Genotype, birth year, birth type, dam age, sex and/or management group, and record age were fitted as fixed effects and within-genotype sire fitted as a random effect. Crossbreeds of 1/2 ASM expressed the most desirable effects for improving average fiber diameter (AFD), clean fleece weight (CFW), yield, coefficient of variation of AFD (CVAFD), yearling staple length (YSL) to AFD ratio (YSL/AFD), and CFW to metabolic yearling bodyweight (YWT0.75) ratio (CFW/YWT0.75) but showed the least post-weaning average daily gain (powADG) and YWT. Genotype of backcrossing with 1/4 ASM obtained moderate improvements in AFD, CFW, CVAFD, and YSL/AFD but the highest YSL, WWT, and prwADG. Except for yield (-1.42%) and CFW/YWT0.75 (-1%), heterosis estimates were generally low and positive, and ranged from 0.1% for CVAFD to 4% for powADG, which indicates the potential to improve relevant traits through exploiting heterosis to a varying extent. The ASMs sampled in this study were found to be superior to GAFs for AFD, CFW, yield, and CVAFD by 19.82%, 11.68%, 14.47%, and 6.99%, respectively, but inferior for YSL, PowADG, and YWT by 4.36%, 50.97%, and 16.93%, respectively. ASMs also appeared to be more efficient than GAFs in clean wool production (25.34%) and staple length growth (16.17%). The results of our study strongly suggest that an infusion of ASM genes via crossbreeding is an effective and appropriate approach to improve wool microns and wool production from GAF sheep, and we make recommendations to tackle the undesirable traits of YWT and YSL from ASM introduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vibrio vulnificus (V. vulnificus), a Gram-negative marine bacterium, can cause life-threatening primary septicemia, especially in patients with liver diseases. How V. vulnificus affects the liver and how it acts on macrophages are not well understood. In this report, we demonstrated that V. vulnificus infection causes a strong inflammatory response, marked expansion of liver-resident macrophages, and liver damage in mice. We demonstrated further that V. vulnificus activates mTOR in macrophages and inhibition of mTOR differentially regulates V. vulnificus induced inflammatory responses, suggesting the possibility of targeting mTOR as a strategy to modulate V. vulnificus induced inflammatory responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Initiation of hair follicle (HF) is the first and most important stage of HF morphogenesis. However the precise molecular mechanism of initiation of hair follicle remains elusive. Meanwhile, in previous study, the more attentions had been paid to the function of genes, while the roles of non-coding RNAs (such as long noncoding RNA and microRNA) had not been described. Therefore, the roles of long noncoding RNA(LncRNA) and coding RNA in sheep skin during the initiation of sheep secondary HF were integrated and analyzed, by using strand-specific RNA sequencing (ssRNA-seq).A total of 192 significant differentially expressed genes were detected, including 67 up-regulated genes and 125 down-regulated genes between stage 0 and stage 1 of HF morphogenesis during HF initiation. Only Wnt2, FGF20 were just significant differentially expressed among Wnt, Shh, Notch and BMP signaling pathways. Further expression profile analysis of lncRNAs showed that 884 novel lncRNAs were discovered in sheep skin expression profiles. A total of 15 lncRNAs with significant differential expression were detected, 6 up-regulated and 9 down-regulated. Among of differentially expressed genes and LncRNA, XLOC002437 lncRNA and potential target gene COL6A6 were all significantly down-regulated in stage 1. Furthermore, by using RNAhybrid, XLOC005698 may be as a competing endogenous RNA ‘‘sponges” oar-miR-3955-5p activity. Gene Ontology and KEGG pathway analyses indicated that the significantly enriched pathway was peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) pathway (corrected P-value < 0.05), indicating that PPAR pathway is likely to play significant roles during the initiation of secondary HF.Results suggest that the key differentially expressed genes and LncRNAs may be considered as potential candidate genes for further study on the molecular mechanisms of HF initiation, as well as supplying some potential values for understanding human hair disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]